History of the Pro Baby Center
Ever since starting the Pro Baby Center, we have been working on developing the optimal model for encouraging natality in our country and developing a long-term strategy, which will not be based only on short-term projects.
We believe that the key to encouraging birth and parenting is, first and foremost, valuing your own life as well as the long-term care for the reproductive health of every individual, nurturing a healthy life style and taking responsibility for decisions made about choosing partner as well as responsible sexual behavior.
Creating foundations for healthy and responsible parenting is a long-term process and it requires hard work from the earliest age.
The goal of the Pro Baby Center is to prepare young people, as well as women and men to welcome parenthood and birth through informing, education, campaigns and counselling adapted to their age and individual needs.
Therefore, we have been working intensively on gathering information, visiting centers in the region and other parts of Europe and the world and getting educated. From the first small office of 6m2 in the center of Belgrade and talking to clients who came to us through recommendation, today, after 10 years of work we can say with pride that the services of our Centre through various projects like YOU ARE NOT ALONE, BABY PLUS and the project of educational workshops “Everything you wanted to know about partner relationships that Google couldn’t answer” have been used by over 7300 clients.
We recognized the need for individual counselling of women and couples at the very beginning of our work. It is still going on. On the contrary, apart from the most frequent situations in which girls and women consider abortion, like lack of partner support and primary family, a bad financial situation, there are more complex problems which women and couples are facing. It happens more frequently that young people delay parenting and marriage due to complex partner relationships, unsolved trauma they carry from primary families, previous abortions as well as a lot of pressure and obstacles they face on their way through education, job hunting and difficulties in becoming independent.
The most important activity of the Pro Baby Center is certainly the continuous support to and counselling of pregnant women. Besides the already existent form of direct and by-phone counselling that we have been doing ever since establishing the Center, at the end of 2017, we started the project of counselling for unplanned and crisis pregnancies YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Since that period, and since the various trainings that we had, our counselling services became available in an online form, too, both throughout Serbia and abroad. During the first month of work alone, we were contacted by 40 women.
Counselling work with pregnant women gave way to other problems. We were contacted by younger and younger girls, which was a signal that we should work seriously on a more efficient education of young people. That is how we came up with a project of workshops which prepare young people between 13 and 19 years of age to make responsible choices and good decisions about their reproductive health, so that they can keep it until the period when they want to become parents.
Our educational programs and workshops have been attended by over 1000 young people in Belgrade, like the ones in the primary school “Svetozar Marković“, in Architectural Technical school and Medical school “Beograd. “
Our projects and campaigns have so far been given support by municipalities Stari grad, Savski venac, Vračar and Zvezdara, numerous companies, private entrepreneurs, shopping centers, and organizations, and above all young people, as well as mothers and fathers, who recognized the significance of our work and our sincere dedication to the wellbeing of families and parents in Serbia. We have been given wholehearted support by a large number of volunteers who have taken part in our campaigns and humanitarian actions with great enthusiasm.
It gives us great joy to have succeeded in counselling over 5000 pregnant women so far with very limited resources. Our greatest satisfaction is many mothers and couples who are overjoyed parents of beautiful little ones today after going through crisis at the beginning of pregnancy.
During our counselling work, we observed various socio-economic problems with which women and families were confronted. Those situations were just what encouraged us to initiate a network of support for mums and pregnant women BABY PLUS. We bought the first diapers for our clients from small change that we collected in baby bottles. Today the network of support is spreading more and more in Serbia. Thanks to wonderful people and companies, we initiated the campaign WELCOME PACKAGE FOR BABIES, where we sent mums who have taken part in our projects and their babies products that were generously donated by our donors. The BABY HUB campaign has already found its purpose in Belgrade as a place of exchange for mums and families, where all the people of good will with spare clothes for babies can bring it and, in that way, help socially endangered mums and families. Thanks to that, we provided necessary equipment and clothes for many babies and made the first months of parenting easier for young parents. The BABY HUB is open on Thursdays from 3 to 6 p.m. The goal of the new campaign A LITTLE FOR WHAT MATTERS is to help mums and families to overcome crisis situations about the cost of living and paying the bills.
